My new Voyager Tarot deck arrived last night. I’m having so much fun playing with these beautiful cards and accessing my intuition with the help of the powerful images. In this short video, James Wanless, creator of the deck, tells us how to get started with a new deck of cards. Enjoy!
Here are some highlights:
Count the cards – make sure they’re all there
Clarify your QUESTION for the reading
Be in a calm emotional state to do the reading
Find your own way to shuffle, pick your card(s)
Set your intention that the card you pick will be the right card, and value it
Honor the card you get – even if it seems negative – there is value in all the cards
In the past, I’ve studied and played with several different decks of Tarot cards, including the traditional Rider-Waite deck and the Osho Zen deck (the two main decks I use now), and several others. Now I’m excited to be studying the Voyager Tarot deck by James Wanless. He’s coming to my area in St. Petersburg, Florida soon. I’ll be taking his workshop for certification on the Voyager Tarot deck. In the meantime, I’m having fun exploring and playing with my new deck.
Here’s a great introductory video from James Wanless about this map for the adventure through life called the Tarot:
I’ll keep you posted with my studies and insights along the way.
Recently, I came across the video of my trip to Bimini, Bahamas to swim with wild dolphins on a women’s retreat. It was a wonderful reminder of the rejuvenative power of travel and the message that I received from the dolphins: PLAY! It’s all about play for the dolphins, or that’s how it seems to me. They play “patty-cake” with their flippers, spiral together down to the ocean flood and then jet back to the surface to jump out of the water and re-enter the surface to jump out of the water and back into the ocean with a “whack!” of their tails..in unison! And…they played with us…humans!
Here’s some similar video from a Bimini wild dolphin adventure:
When I got my first glimpse of the dolphins, I was standing on the bow of the dive boat, watching expectantly as we heard the captain call down that he had spotted some dolphins. Magically, they appeared in the bow-stream of the boat, swimming in and out of our current, not more than a foot away. I felt like a little kid…jumping up and down and screeching for joy! Then I got on my belly and reached down in the water to wave to them (we’re not allowed to touch the wild dolphins). Their intelligent eyes and smiling faces welcomed us into their playful world of oceanic treasures.
Snorkeling on the surface of the ocean, the dolphins swam up very close to me and surveyed me with the “eye” that seems to pierce deep into one’s soul. Their clicks and squeaks were so engaging that I found myself trying to squeak back to them under water!
This was not only an adventure, but it was a women’s spiritual retreat. During our daily (optional) playshops we had the chance to delve into our own spirits and become refreshed, renewed, and sometime redirected in our lives and work. I’ve come back with the absolute knowledge that I need to make PLAYFULNESS and important part of my daily life, including my work.
How to Add More Playfulness to Your Life
Playfulness is seriously helpful to our well-being and access to intuitive guidance. Haim Goldenberg, acclaimed mentalist, did a “GoldMind” TV episode which showed how getting in a playful, child-like state of mind allowed a young woman to user her intuition to find the one balloon in a room filled with hundreds of balloons with a message for her in it from Haim.
If you aren’t out playing with the dolphins right now, there are still many ways you can incorporate the playful dolphin spirit into your life. One of my favorite ways to play each morning is to draw a card from my Transcendental Game of Zen Tarot deck. In the introduction to the book that goes with the cards, the author, Ma Deva Padma, tells us that the goal of Zen, through meditation, is to become aware of our eternal center–“a center that has the capacity to see life as a great adventure, a play, a mystery school, and, finally, a blissful journey with no purpose other than to delight in every step of the way.”
I picked the “Playfulness” card the day after I returned home from my dolphin trip. It comes with this commentary: “Life is rarely as serious as we believe it to be, and when we recognize this fact, it responds by giving us more and more opportunities to play.” My goal, and I hope you’ll consider it too, is to add more playfulness into my life every day. And as often as possible, I plan to take a playful retreat to get back in touch with the child-like sense of fun and delight I felt with the dolphins!
While I was writing this post, I had an intuitive insight: It will make me happy to move ahead with one of the retreats I’ve been thinking about attending at the end of the year. I’ve been feeling that I’d like to do something special to celebrate the end of the year, the end of the Mayan calendar, the special dates of 12-12-12 and 12-21-12. One retreat is an awesome retreat to Mayan ruins for yoga and life coaching at Hacienda San Lucas, in Copan Ruinas, Honduras. The other is a a Mayan adventure in Mexico with the Institute of HeartMath, called The Heart of Transformation–Activate Your Heart’s Intelligence. An “Aha!” experience: I realized that the I Ching reading I did for my focus for the year of 2012 was “Retreat”. What more literal interpretation of that guidance could I find?
My initial impression from our first week’s readings in my Atlantic University master’s degree course was that I may be a Type 3. Then, I completed the initial QUEST, the RHETI online Enneagram Type sampler and the TAS inventory in the Riso-Hudson book, The Wisdom of the Enneagram.
After doing those assessments and our reading assignments, my type was not clear. It appeared to be Type 1, 3 or 5. This is interesting to me because these types are all in the Competency Harmonic, which resonates with me. I do feel a need to be competent. However, I was still unsure of my main type. I needed to do some more work to validate and feel comfortable with one type.
I decided to research what other teachers and writers have found in correspondences of the Enneagram with MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), since I feel confident about my MBTI type of INTJ. There is no one Enneagram Type representing my MBTI type, but the general consensus in researched studies I found was that it corresponds to Enneagram Types 5, 4, and 9 (somewhat). Since 5 is the only one in the grouping of my highest RHETI scores that was helpful in “bracketing” my type more closely.
On a fun side trip, I explored the different Enneagram types at a party. Do you see yourself or your friends in any of these descriptions? People-watching is a great past-time:
I also remembered reading in some of the material about Gurdjieff’s teachings of the Enneagram that there was a correspondence of some sort with the Tarot symbolism. I reviewed the Tarot and Enneagram correspondences for the major arcana cards for Enneagram Types 1, 3 and 5 and reflected on the feelings and the meanings as I understand the Tarot. I could relate to all three cards. Then I used my pendulum to help me discern which one was representative of my main Enneagram Type and I got a positive response on Type 5 only.
Next, I explored the Enneagram triads for more clues. Again, I discovered that I related best to the thinking triad and Type 5 was the only one of the three highest RHETI scores that is a thinking type.
I tried to recall examples from childhood and adulthood that would corroborate Type 5 for me. When I was a little girl, I used to anxiously await my grandfather’s return from work when I visited at his house. He was an attorney and he would bring home “important papers” (probably discarded documents) and give them to me. As a junior high school student, I was an “A student”, very interested in science and driven to perform well in school to be appreciated and valued (which I didn’t feel at home). I was a member of the Science Club. In college, I started in pre-dentistry and loved doing research papers. Today, I am an instructional designer and e-learning developer for my company. I spend much of my time researching and interviewing subject matter experts so that I can write explanations of complex information in simple terms to teach others how to do tasks. I enjoy learning new, complex metaphysical subjects like astrology and the Edgar Cayce readings and studying them in-depth over a long time. I studied with Noel Tyl for three years to earn a master’s certification in astrology. I have been an ARE member and actively studying the readings for over 20 years. I’ve hosted an Internet spiritual study group based on the Cayce readings and related topics over 15 years. I also deal with bouts of anxiety and nervous system exhaustion created by overwork, self-doubt, and tension. I believe these examples fit the descriptions of Type 5, Investigator.
Finally, I read and reflected on the Riso-Hudson reading on the levels of functioning for each of the three types: 1, 3 and 5. I most related to the healthy and average levels of Type 5.
Overall, I feel most comfortable rationally and “in my gut” with Type 5, Investigator, at this time.
My instructor gave me this feedback:
Interestingly, you’ve provided a good example of using the intuition to type yourself, because you’ve allowed yourself to go beyone the assignments and to feel into different systems you’ve worked with in the past. At the same time, the very same behavior points to the investigative nature you describe (a Five). How many would even think to investigate all that was asked for this lesson, and then to go to the Myers-Briggs, tarot cards, pendulum questions, and on? Additionally, your return to your earlier years and tendencies was a wise move; we can learn much by doing this, as many of us are remarkably diligent about our growth and might not recognize the “old me” in the “new.”
Now that you’ve had a chance to read a little about your Enneagram personality type, what type do you think best fits you? What avenues did you explore to help you validate and feel comfortable with that type? Knowing your type can change your life by giving you insights and direction to get yourself out of the box you may have inadvertently put yourself in. Leave a comment so we can discuss it.
Change Your Life for Good - CYL4G 